Winter comes to SouthCoast for New Year

Sunday

Dec 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2012 at 6:47 AM

NEW BEDFORD — SouthCoast residents may not have had a white Christmas, but they certainly will have a white New Year, with four to eight inches of wet heavy snow expected to fall Saturday night and falling temperatures throughout the week.

ARIEL WITTENBERG

NEW BEDFORD — SouthCoast residents may not have had a white Christmas, but they certainly will have a white New Year, with four to eight inches of wet heavy snow expected to fall Saturday night and falling temperatures throughout the week.

Snow began to fall around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, and is expected to continue through 7 a.m. Sunday morning, according to National Weather Service Meteorologist Alan Dunham.

A winter storm warning went into effect at 7 a.m. Saturday for all of Rhode Island and Eastern Massachusetts except for the Cape and the Islands, Dunham said.

Dunham said the snow, which was expected to be at its heaviest between 5 p.m. Saturday and 1 a.m. Sunday, has "high water content."

"That means at least some branches are coming down from its weight," Dunham said. "There will be some power outages."

Temperatures that were in the low 30s Saturday are expected to get progressively colder throughout the week, meaning the snow will remain for the foreseeable future.

"The first week of 2013 is going to be white and chilly if not downright cold," Dunham said.

In preparation for the storm, New Bedford issued a parking ban that started at 7 p.m. Dartmouth's parking ban started at midnight Saturday and will continue through noon Sunday. Fairhaven's parking ban prohibiting overnight parking and parking on the hydrant side of a street during a snow fall goes into effect annually on Dec. 1.

By noon Saturday, New Bedford had already attached plows to the more than 170 trucks that plow the city's streets.

Department of Public Infrastructure Commissioner Ronald Labelle said Saturday afternoon that the he expected plow crews to hit the streets around 9 p.m., when the snow fall was thick enough to plow.

"The hope is that this is mostly rain, but that doesn't look like the case, so we are prepared," Labelle said.

Sanders went out earlier in the day to "pre-salt" the street to "prepare so that when the snow falls it melts right away," Labelle said.

Streets above Coggeshall Street are plowed by 70 trucks from the Department of Public Infrastructure, and streets below Coggeshall Street are plowed by 100 trucks from the Department of Public Facilities, Labelle said.

Fairhaven Board of Public Works Superintendent Vincent Furtado said Saturday afternoon that the plows were "at the ready."

"Typically the magic number is four inches, that's when we send people out," he said, adding that streets were to be sanded before snow fell "so the roads stay passable for folks."

Fairhaven has a number of unpaved roads which complicates plowing, Furtado said.

But, he said "we put the same guys in the same trucks in the same streets every year, so they know where they're going and what they are going to encounter."

In Dartmouth, Director of Public Works David Hickox said the town usually pre-treats the roads with a liquid salt treatment. For this storm, he said, the town was using straight salt to ensure that rain expected early on in the storm did not wash away the treatment.

"We're in good shape to address anything that should happen tonight," he said.

The mild but widespread winter storm began falling Saturday over most of the Northeast and the upper Ohio River Valley, the second in less than a week for the regions.

Forecasters expected the heaviest snowfall of up to 8 inches in southern New England, including SouthCoast. Farther south, New York City and Philadelphia saw a mix of rain and snowfall as the storm moved in from the west. A few inches of snow were forecast.

About 20 vehicles piled up in a storm-related chain-reaction crash on Interstate 93 in New Hampton, N.H., police said, and five people were injured.

Drivers throughout the regions were warned to be cautious. Officials lowered the speed limit to 45 mph on much of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, about 300 miles from the Ohio state line to east-central Pennsylvania.